Actions > Words. What we’re doing to support #BlackLivesMatter

I want to make a significant announcement and explain our motivation.

As of today, June 9th at 9am Pacific, any company in the world can use our Treehouse Apprenticeship Program for free - it is now open source for all.

Here’s why:

At Treehouse we’ve been thinking deeply about what we can do to actively tear down White Supremacy in the United States of America.

We know that systemic racism was built into the foundations of our nation, going all the way back from when the first slave ship arrived on the coast of Virginia in 1619.

Part of that system is education and hiring practices in corporate America, which perpetuate the generational racial wealth gap.

For the past three years, we’ve partnered with amazing organizations like the Boys & Girls Clubs, Dress for Success, AnitaB, Kapor Center, Urban League, ChickTech, Edison Job Corps, Goodwill, Salvation Army and companies like NPower, Verizon, Mailchimp, Niantic, Nike and more, to disrupt that racist system as much as possible.

We invested over $1.4m in building a repeatable, scalable, diverse talent pipeline that empowered underrepresented families to get high-paying engineering and design jobs. 

We saw ...

• Family incomes triple in less than 12 months
• 100% of families get covered with high-quality healthcare
• 401(k) annual contributions increase by 870%. 

All with $0 of student debt.

47 apprentices in Atlanta, Dallas, New Jersey, Portland and more, went through the program and successfully converted to full-time employees. Here is one of those amazing groups - they worked hard to start careers at companies like Mailchimp. They’re still successfully employed today.

However, a lot of companies could not afford the apprenticeship program. We needed to charge companies $230k so we could support a full-time team at Treehouse who could install and manage the program to make it successful.

We want to remove that cost barrier completely.

By open sourcing the Treehouse Apprenticeship Program, any company in the world can use it for free. Any company can now reliably, repeatedly and affordably hire amazing talent from the underrepresented community in their town or city. Any company can do it. 

Here’s an overview of how the program works.

CEOs, it’s over to you

• There’s now no excuse for having a lack of diversity on your team. 
• CEOs, you can hire amazing talent from the Black community. 
• We’re calling on you to act. 

We will be launching a simple site soon to explain how the program works, including a training video, and providing free access to the project management tools and methods.

What about Treehouse?

Treehouse is a small team of 45 people. Although we are a small company, we understand the impact of our privileges. We are committed to continue and improve our fight against these injustices.

We are not perfect and I, personally, have made many mistakes in my on-going journey to become an educated ally to the Black community. Posting on social media or putting a #BlackLivesMatter sign in my yard will not change the underlying system.

However, empowering the Black community to build generational wealth for their families and children will begin to change the system. Money = Power.

In addition to open-sourcing our Apprenticeship program, we are doing the following …

1. Training 100% of all Treehouse Employees on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
2. Committing to use apprenticeship to diversify our team and ensure non-biased hiring practices.
3. Amplifying the voices of Black individuals across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn by re-sharing posts every week.
4. Giving all of our employees $100 gift cards to support Black-owned businesses
5. Instituting a flexible-work policy to ensure that everyone has the time and mental space to support their loved ones during these scary times
6. Donating $6,000 to joincampaignzero.org

Resources

The list below includes resources so you can support the #BlackLivesMatter movement that is happening in our country right now.

Donate

• The Freedom Fund
• Reclaim the Block
• Campaign Zero
• Ways You Can Help
• List of Bail Funds for Protestors across the Country 
• Know your Rights Camp
• NAACP
• NAACP Legal Defense Fund
• American Civil Liberties Union
• Black Visions Collective
• Black Lives Matter
• Minnesota Freedom Fund
• George Floyd Memorial Fund
• Justice for Breonna Taylor Fund
• I Run with Maud

Shop

• Beauty Brands
• Black Books Matter
• Blackout Coalition - US Map of Black Banks and Credit Unions
• Black-Owned Restaurant Lists organized by City
• 77 Black Owned Businesses to Support Right Now
• Official Black Wall Street - Black-Owned Business Directory
• We Buy Black Marketplace

Act

• 20 Actions White people & non-Black POCs in Corporate can take to show up for Black People right now
• Justice for Big Floyd
• Justice for Breonna Taylor
• Communities United Against Police Brutality 
• 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice
• Obama - Anguish and Action
• Ways You Can Help
• Petitions & Numbers to Call

Listen

• A conversation with President Obama: Reimagining Policing in the Wake of Continued Police Violence
• 1619 (New York Times)
• About Race
• Code Switch (NPR)
• Intersectionality Matters! Hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw
• Momentum: A Race Forward Podcast
• Pod For the Cause (Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights)
• Pod Save the People (Crooked Media)
• Seeing White
• Parenting Forward podcast episode ‘Five Pandemic Parenting Lessons with Cindy Wang Brandt”
• Fare of the Free Child Podcast
• 8 Songs that Provide Context to Police Violence Protests
• Freedom: Beyonce featuring Kendrick Lamar

Learn

• 2020 Ain’t Cancelled 
• 8 Can't Wait
• Talking About Race
• Historians on the Confederate Monument Debate
• Project Implicit: Take the Race IAT
• MappingPoliceViolence.org/unarmed
• The Police Shootings Database
• The economic impact of closing the racial wealth gap 

Read

• White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
• How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi
• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
• Divided Sisters by Midge Wilson and Kathy Russell
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
• Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• They Can’t Kill Us All by Wesley Lowery
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• Fatal Invention by Dorothy Roberts
• Locking Up Our Own by James Foreman
• The Miner’s Canary by Lani Guiner and Gerald Torres
• The Wretched Earth by Frantz Fanon
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
• 5 Steps Latinos Can Take to Combat Anti-Blackness
• White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
• How to Respond to an Offensive Comment at Work

 Watch

• Just Mercy
• 13th (Netflix) (YouTube)
• American Son (Netflix)
• Dear White People (Netflix)
• See You Yesterday (Netflix)
• When They See Us (Netflix)
• If Beale Street Could Talk (Hulu)
• The Hate U Give (Cinemax)
• Kind in the Wilderness (HBO)
• Jane Elliott on the Oprah Winfrey Show (1992), Blue Eyes Brown Eyes 
• A Conversation on Race
• Red Table Talk: Unpacking White Privilege 

Follow

• The Great Unlearn (Instagram)
• Rachel Cargle (Instagram and Facebook)
• Ibram X. Kendi (Instagram and Facebook)
• Black Lives Matter (Instagram and Facebook)
• Ashlee Marie Preston (Instagram and Facebook)
• Raquel Willis (Instagram)
• Indya Moore (Instagram)
• Color of Change (Instagram and Facebook)
• From Privilege to Progress (Instagram and Facebook)
• Munroe Bergdorf (Instagram)
• The Conscious Kid (Instagram and Facebook)
• Brittany Packnett Cunningham (Instagram)
• Black Creatives to Follow on Instagram (List)